On love: Part 1

Notes on romantic fatalism:

16. From within love, we conceal the haphazard nature of our lives behind a purposive veil. We insist that the meeting with our redeemer, objectively haphazard and hence unlikely, has been prewritten in a scroll slowly unwinding in the sky. We invent a destiny to spare ourselves the anxiety that would arise from acknowledging that the little sense there is in our lives is merely created by ourselves, that there is no scroll (and hence no pre-ordained face awaiting) and that whom we may or may not be meeting on airplanes has no sense beyond what we choose to attribute to it - in short, the anxiety that no one has written our story or assured our loves.

18. My mistake was to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a given person. It was the error of thinking that Chloe, rather than love, was inevitable.....The moment when I would feel that our meeting or not meeting was in the end only an accident, only a probability of 1 in 989.7, would also be the moment when I would have ceased to feel the absolute necessity of a life with her - and thereby have ceased to love her.

Notes on idealization:

9. What is so frightening is the extent to which we may idealise others when we have such trouble tolerating ourselves - because we have such trouble.........I must have realised that Chloe was only human, with all the implications carried by the word, but could I not be forgiven for my desire to suspend such a thought? Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another perfection that eludes us within ourselves, an through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowldge) a precarious faith in our species.

Notes on Marxism:

12. Unrequited love may be painful, but is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bittersweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt to take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.

22. A long, gloomy tradition in Western thought argues that love is in its essence an unreciprocated, Marxist emotion and that desire can only thrive on the impossibility of mutuality.....Centuries later, Montaigne declared," In love, there is nothing but a frantic desire for what flees from us" -- an idea echoed by Anatole France's maxim "It is not customary to love what one has.".......To listen to his view, lovers cannot do anything save oscillate between the twin poles of yearning for someone and longing to be rid of them.

~Alain de Botton~

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